How to Work Out Like A Minimalist And Still Make Gains

Foreign. What's going on, everybody? And welcome back to the Build With Science podcast. You're here with your host, as always, of course, me, myself and I, that is Max Coleman, AKA Coleman at all. And sitting in front of me as tradition is D. Punny Plotkin doesn't play about his paper. Plotkin, AKA Daniel Plotkin, AKA Danny Boy. And today we're going to be talking about, well, something a little different. Normally, we talk about how you can, so to speak, optimize your training to elicit the best goals possible. But today we're going to be talking about the least that you can do and still make gains in the gym. We're going to briefly talk about the least you can do with respect to time, although we have a whole episode on that, so make sure to check that one out, because we're going to gloss over it a little bit. And then we're going to talk about, from an effort standpoint, what's the least you can do and still hope to make gains. And then we'll talk about what you can do outside of the gym to either optimize your results from the gym while doing as little as possible or as well, just the least you can do with respect to things like nutrition and stuff like that and how you can get away with stuff like that. Right. So before we do that, let's talk very briefly about how we can shorten our workouts is the least we can do from a time perspective with respect to workouts. So, Danny Boy, I've been rambling for five minutes now. You want to kind of gloss over that for us.

Yeah. So I think the main ways that you can shorten the amount of time that you spend in the gym are probably super sets and drop sets. So I enjoy doing super sets with antagonist muscles. So doing a push and then a pull or doing supersets with muscles that have nothing to do with each other. So going from a leg extension to a lateral raise or a leg extension to a bicep curl, so you save pretty much half the time if you were just going to be doing nothing during that break. So that's a useful tool. And then drop sets, probably, at least based on your meta analysis, give you a bit more stimulus per set or per group of sets in, in the context of. Of a drop set, either, you know, like a cherry on top at the end of a session where you can get potentially eek out a little bit more stimulus, where there's little downside. That's sort of how I try to maximize time in a session or even maximize stimulus in a session. So any other.

I think. Yeah, no, I think that was really well said. I didn't know this, but there's actually two papers looking at muscle growth from a. Using supersets. I didn't even know these existed. I thought we didn't have any. They're both on untrained subjects and one of them uses like resistance bands as like their form of resistance training. So not, not incredible designs, but they do show similar growth results from I think, eight weeks of training using either traditional training where you're resting between exercises, or supersets. So we can at least lean on that a little bit. But generally, just to say, like the three things that I consider when choosing supersets is we want to make sure that the muscles aren't interfering with each other. So like Danny boy said, that's either antagonist agonist or just muscles that don't interfere with each other. In general, your lateral delts are not going to be affected much by your hamstrings or quads. Right. But you also want to make sure that the exercises themselves aren't interfering. So even though your delts aren't worked very hard on a, like a back squat or walking lunges or anything like that, your cardiovascular system and your psychological system certainly is, which might interfere with your ability to like reduce maximal force while you're doing lateral raises. And then of course, just pragmatism. You don't want to have to walk from the Smith machine all the way over to the dumbbells or whatever it may be, the lateral raise machine. So if they're far apart from one another in the gym, that's, that's kind of annoying too. Drop sets. Yep, super great, especially from a time saving perspective. And the skin splitting pump that they give you is certainly fun as well. And then one that we didn't mention is just blood flow restriction. That's another one. That's one, that's probably the one that I use the most commonly for time saving, especially for things like calves and forearms for those kind of like middle children of the muscle groups. I really enjoy doing that stuff just because it's like you get in five sets, you rest 30 seconds between each one and, and you, you bada bing, bada boom. You're, you're, you're through. Uh, and then of course we very briefly touched on having a home gym, which was the dopest thing ever for saving time in the gym. But we will leave that to you guys to watch that episode on your own. Now to get to the bulk of this episode, which is what's the least that I can do from an effort standpoint and still make gains in the gym? Because unlike Danny Boy and myself, most people have friends and things that they like to do outside of thinking about muscle growth and they don't want to spend all of their time and mental attentional bandwidth to growing as much muscle as possible. So let's start here with kind of the difference between optimal and practical. You want to touch on that a little bit before we, I mean we don't even. There's not a whole lot to say there. But just is there a way, like can we be sure we're making meaningful gains? Let's say, let's start with like a volume perspective, like the number of sets that we're doing per week, the difference between maybe optimal so that what we normally say of like 12 to 20 sets and then maybe something like closer to nine sets or something like that per week.

Yeah. So I would say, well, you could probably define it a bunch of ways optim optimal versus practical for the typical individual is how can I probably get most of my gains without going well out of my way to cross my T's and dot my I's kind of thing. So practical would be how can I fit it into my life very easily and get maybe 6, 70 to 80% of the gains I'm going to make. And maybe I'll take a little bit longer in terms of years wise, but it'll fit well into my schedule and it won't be mentally and physically draining. While optimal would be I'm doing everything possible to try to ensure that I'm getting the most out of each session in my training in general. So I think that people probably over estimate how much is needed to get most of the way there. Yeah, meaningful gains over time. Where from a set perspective it seems like around that sort of eight set mark is where most people are probably going to continue to make meaningful gains and maybe even most of their gains. And starting there especially would probably be a good idea even for people that are trying to optimize just to see whether you can really milk those lower set numbers and keep on progressing and then start to play around with different muscle groups and try to bring them up instead of just jumping into, you know, crazy number of sets. So yeah, that's from a volume standpoint. From an effort standpoint.

Go ahead. No, actually I'll say it. But just before we start talking about effort, like if you are training with somewhere between like six and Nine sets a week for your major muscle groups. And remember, the way that they quantify volume in these studies is that a bench press counts towards the chest, towards the triceps, and towards the front delts. Right. Which is actually really nice. It means that we don't have to do 10 direct sets of triceps a week and stuff like that, which is really great. Right. But if you're doing somewhere around six to eight, maybe nine sets a week for the majority of your muscles, right, chest, back, biceps, triceps, shoulders, quads, hamstrings, calves, boom. That's, like, not a lot of time that you're spending in the gym. And also not a lot of effort. You could really knock all of that out in two workouts and not be spending more than two hours in the gym a week, probably. And even less if you were doing things like supersets and drop sets and BFR training. And you can still be confident that you might not be making, you know, a hundred percent of your gains, but you're making enough gains for things for your grandma to notice a difference if you don't see her every six months, especially if you're doing other things right outside of the gym. And we'll kind of touch on those here in a second. But you want to talk about effort from a standpoint of, like, how close to failure we're actually having to train.

Yeah. So just for context, the sets that we're talking about here in the 6 to 9 range are high effort sets. So sets that have either three reps left in the tank or less, but from sort of like a high vantage point, what's the least amount of effort that you can put in per set and still make gains? It seems like that number is likely hovering around 8. So there's even RPE2.

Or an RIR of 8. Yeah, yeah.

An RIR of 8 in RPE2. Yeah. So 8 left in the tank or so where you can continue to still make meaningful gains. That's based on mostly velocity data. We don't have a ton of direct evidence, but you can be fairly confident. Based on, I think, the velocity data, 8rar would be a conservative estimate. So just based on that velocity loss, you could Even guess higher than 8 for a couple of those studies.

Yeah, Zach's better regression. So Zach Robinson shout out to data, different strength homies, his meta regression. I think there was one study, at least in one data point on that graph, the, you know, that showed 10 reps in reserve was still causing growth. Not as much growth, obviously. As closer to failure, but it was still causing some degree of a delta in muscle chain muscle size from pre to post study. So point is, you can train relatively far away. I mean, dude, an 8 RAR set, an RPE of 2 is less than what powerlifters are doing on their deload weeks. Like that is a low effort set. Oftentimes people clown on individuals on Instagram. I think this is like one of the funniest comments I've ever seen. There was someone working out and someone commented like this dude trains to mild discomfort, which is incredible to me. Like the genius hatred comments that you see, it's unbelievable. But mild discomfort might be enough to still make meaningful growth over the course of a training career, right? So even though you probably could stand to grow more from training closer to failure, you don't have to. Especially if you're someone who training to failure is like really psychologically taxing to you. And the idea of going to the gym and training super close to failure is keeping you from going to the gym. You can be pretty confident that you don't have to do so and still make gains in the gym. Sorry, I didn't mean to kind of like steamroll you there in case you have anything else to add.

No, all good. I think the, the most important thing to add here would be for the majority of individuals. This is just interesting information, but you probably want to take sets closer to failure because you're probably not, you're not doing anything that's super useful. By not going closer to failure, if anything, you're probably leaving gains on the table. But it's good to know for specific context. Like if your grandma asks if she, she can work out with you and join you in your session and you're like, listen grandma, like if you, you want to be at least four reps, like don't do that with your grandma. Make sure that her initial foray into fitness is an enjoyable one. And you can be confident in knowing that even your grandma, who is, you know, 70, whatever years old, is still going to be making gains pretty far away from failure. So your grandma, maybe a client who isn't super inclined to lifting weights or super nervous and you want to do right by them, you want them to start making progress. So for the initial weeks, if you didn't know the information that you could be further away from failure, you might be pushing them a little harder. But knowing that, that you can be pretty far away from failure and still make progress, you can say, listen, I'm not going to push on the gas pedal just yet. Make the person fall in love with fitness and then if you're trying to eke out a bit more than obviously get closer to failure and add more sets and so on.

Cool. And I feel like it's probably important to point out that when we're, we're talking about volume and intensity of effort here. So, so it's, I think that it's, we should point out that if you're, you should probably choose one with respect to if you're trying to get away with the least you can do. So can you do six sets a week for each muscle group with eight RIR and still make gains? Maybe, but you're probably better off doing six sets a week with like an RIR of two to three or the other way around. Like, it's kind of like a, you choose your, your battle type of thing. Would you rather be in the gym for a little bit longer, doing more sets, a little bit further away from failure, or would you rather be in the gym super in and out really quickly, but still be pretty confident that you're making gains? So that I think, Danny boy, you're one of your recent reels of Dr. Schoenfeld talking about how the, like the lower number of sets that you're doing. So if you're trying to get away with like a minimum effective dose of training, you probably want to be sure that you're training pretty hard just so you can be ultra confident that what you're doing is going to result in some meaningful growth. So there is a balance between those two. And I can't say that super confidently from like an empirical standpoint, but you're probably going to have to choose your battle. You probably can't get away with doing super low volume, super far away from failure and still be confident that you're going to see meaningful results. So it's going to come down to your personal choice. And again, this could be, I could be wrong. You could be. You could make meaningful gains with very low volume, super far away from failure, but the likelihood is low. If I was a betting man, I wouldn't put money on that trading approach personally.

It's also just like there's very little upside. So you're doing the set anyways. So unless you're super obverse to the sensation of going to failure, which the vast majority of people are not, like a few sessions and they're totally fine, why potentially waste your time when there's physiological reasons and practical reasons why, and empirical reasons why we would believe that you're going to make more progress getting closer to failure. So yeah, but yeah, you're right, of course there's going to be that seesaw where more intensity, you could probably get away much easier with less volume and vice versa. If you drop the intensity a little bit, you'd probably want to do a little bit more volume to make up for that. And for the vast majority of individuals who are trying to save time, you probably want to lean on more intensity and less volume because you can get in and out and not worry about it. But it's nice to know that there's like a give and take there where if another individual really prefers not taking sets closer to failure, they can be a little bit further away and maybe spend a little bit more time in the gym, do a few more sets and so on.

Things are pretty cool too, is you can do these time saving things like you can do time saving things farther away from failure so that like even the time you're spending in the gym is pretty comparable because you, you're, you're doing, you're taking shorter rest periods and you're doing all these intensity techniques like blood flow restriction and stuff like that. And you're never having to go super close to failure without like, so you, there's able to, you're able to pack in lots of volume while staying relatively close away from failure. Staying relatively far away from failure.

Sorry.

And still making gains, which is really nice as well. So great points. Also we've been talking about the least you can do and still make gains. But it's really important to note that like, let's say you're at a level of muscularity that you're really happy with and you're not like super concerned with putting on more and more muscle. The, the amount of volume you have to do, the amount of effort you need to do to maintain muscle mass is immediately low compared to the amount of. The amount of work that you need to do to continue to make progress. Which is another really important thing to know. So keep in mind that this conversation is in the context of progressing, not necessarily maintaining. Okay, great points on volume and intensity. What about frequency? How many days a week do I have to go to the gym if I want to continue to make progress?

Yeah. So I think, I mean as little as one is totally fine. So I think the give and take relationship between volume and frequency is generally speaking above that 10 to 12 number of sets per muscle group per week, you probably want to add another session. But if you're doing less than that per week. You're based on the evidence, it seems very clear that you're most likely going to get most of your gains if you're doing less than 12 sets, around 10 sets or so per week per muscle group with just one session. You don't need to split that up into two sessions. But based on the volume literature, if you're going above that 10 to 12 number, then you'd likely want to split it up so you can make tons of gains and if anything, most of the gains that you're going to make just from one session per week. But as we spoke about, if you want to maximize gains, then you'd probably want to split it up into at least two and maybe even three based on personal preference, what your performance looks like, what your progress over time looks like, and so on.

Yeah, I mean like, like every conversation that we have, a lot of this just comes down to what you prefer. Like for instance, the idea, because if you're going to the gym once a week, that one workout a week, if you're doing like minimum effective volumes, is going to be probably longer than an hour, even if you're using a bunch time saving techniques. Because if you're trying to get in nine sets, or let's say like six to eight sets for your chest, your back, your quads, your hamstrings, your calves, your biceps, your triceps, like all that, it's going to be a relatively long workout, right? And I hate long workouts personally. Like I, if I'm in the gym for more than two hours, like what I like feel like I'm spinning my wheels like crazy, right. I actually, I like to work out like 10 to 12 times a week where I'm just splitting my workups, workouts into these like exercise snacks essentially. But that's really, really easy to do when you work in a lab and, or a gym that you're, you're spending like eight hours of your day inside of. Right. It's easy to break them up like that. For most people that's not an option. But yeah, I think that most of the data that we, most of the data that we have in this entire field is based on two times a week frequencies. Right. So most of the, of the resistance training research that there is, these individuals, these subjects in the studies are only going into the lab two times a week. You're really lucky if you can get them in three times a week. But those studies are a nightmare to run, right? So that's, I think that's a really Important thing to point out. And with respect to the frequency thing, there's not a clear. Like Danny boy and I were just talking about this the other day, there's not a clear. Assuming that you're doing the same number of sets a week, splitting that up into more or less frequencies doesn't. There's not a clear benefit to doing so right now. Once you get into. Which is not the context of this conversation, once you get into much higher volumes, like probably closer to 20, there's probably a good argument there to be had with respect to splitting those up into multiple workouts. Right. Even though it's not super clear empirically. Okay, really great conversations of our frequencies. You can get away with one time a week volumes probably want to be somewhere between six and nine sets for each of your major muscle groups. And then effort probably want to be anywhere between 0 and 3 reps in reserve, especially on the lower end of the volumes. But you can get away with even up to eight reps in reserve or an RPE of two if you're training with slightly higher volumes. Right. And you might even be able to get away with that with slightly lower volumes. But we don't know confidently right now. Okay, let's talk about how we can. Very briefly talk about how we can make these workouts as effective as possible when trying to do the least amount of effort. So things like exercise selection, maybe things like long muscle length training and stuff like that, you want to, you want to take that.

Yeah. So I think we can, especially with lower volumes, make pretty decent inferences based on the literature we have. So we have a good amount of studies now showing that training at longer muscle lengths produces more hypertrophy. And many of these studies are basically specialization type studies and they're fairly low volumes as well. So it's very possible that as you get higher and higher with the variety of exercises and increases in volume, you're not going to get as much bang from your. For your buck from doing those long lengths biased exercises. But especially in this context, we have pretty much direct evidence showing that biasing more of your exercises to be either difficult at long muscle lengths as it pertains to the resistance curve. So the exercise actually being hardest in the stretch position or the muscle being placed in a stretch position during the exercise is a good idea for maximizing the stimulus per set. So this is a tricep overhead or a seated hamstring curl or an RDL or a behind the back cable bicep curl and so on a bunch of options where you can put the muscle in a stretch position and also challenge the muscle in a stretch position. So I think that would be one and the second would be. You have compounds written here, I think along the lines of compounds. It's sort of like supersets, compounds, things where you can get a lot of bang for your buck in a short amount of time. And I believe someone in your lab is running a study on supersets. So we'll see if we can get potentially even more. I'm not sure about. I actually didn't know those studies existed for supersets. I don't know about the whole band situation study. So there's pretty good evidence to show that performance increases with supersets, antagonist supersets specifically. So whether that produces a hypertrophy benefit is obviously a completely open question. So I'm actually a little bit excited for, for those.

I'm pumped, dude. I think they're super cool. It's the first one in train subject. So shout out to Ryan Burke. I think it's gonna be a really good study. I think that, you know, funny enough, generally speaking there the RPEs are higher. I believe with superset, like the superset data lends itself towards. People think they're more challenging. So again, it kind of boils down to the same thing that your, your meta analysis on cardio. Like the. Was it fast and hard or slow and steady or whatever it may have been. It boils down to would you rather suffer more for a shorter period of time or suffer less for a longer period of time? Would you rather go to a really shitty prison for one month or a nice prison for one year? It's just kind of like that decision, right? Yeah. So I think that kind of boils down to the compounds. Lengthened partials is another option. So like you should choose exercises and exercises or you should choose exercises that are the most challenging in the lengthened position or that just place the muscle in a very stretched position. But you can also like just do lengthened partial where you're just lifting through the first third to two thirds of an exercise. That's also an option for doing that. Okay.

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All right, now let's touch on how to make our workouts more effective. Just to wrap this up outside of the gym. So we're going to talk about if you are, if you are trying to get away with the least you can do in the gym, what can you do outside of the gym to make sure that those workouts are going to be effective? So let's start here with nutrition. What should we be doing with respect to what we're putting in our body to ensure that those minimum effective workouts are as effective as possible?

Yeah, so just to. I, I didn't want to make it seem like long lost lengths were really the only thing. So just to put a bow on.

Yeah, go ahead.

Previous section, I think making sure that you choose exercises that you personally feel stable in. And basically like, if you're going to choose a very small amount of exercises and really try to maximize, if you have an eh exercise that you're not really connected with, like, don't keep it in there. Make sure you're putting your A plus hitters in in order to maximize growth. Like, even from a theoretical standpoint, like it makes absolutely no sense to put an exercise in where you're like, all right, I really love this exercise, but I'm going to switch over to this one because I want some more variety. That's okay for somebody that's doing a lot of volume, but for somebody that's doing very, very little, I think it makes sense to just keep their A players in and then switch to another A player rather than like having some A, some Bs and maybe even some Cs because of the fact that that specific muscle group doesn't have, you know, 10 exercises. Like how many exercises really are there for the hamstring? There's like four.

Yeah.

You know, like Nordics within the hamstring curl and RDL and a lying hamstring, like a seated and a lying hamstring curl. So I think it makes sense for somebody that's really trying to maximize to, to keep in many of their sort of like a players. Yeah, let's talk about.

So just to. Yeah, this is a really good point. And like you would want to choose maybe something like a bench press or an incline. You would want to choose something like an incline dumbbell press as opposed to like a cable fly or something like that because you're, you're confident that you're getting upper chest, middle chest, tricep growth as opposed to Just middle chest growth. I mean kind of theoretical there, but same thing for like maybe do some more overhead presses instead of lateral raises so that you're getting some side delts as well as some tricep work as well. Right. Or you know, instead of blah, blah, blah. You get my point. For like row you would want mostly rows bent over rows, RDls as opposed to hamstring curls in a lot of instances, but still keeping in hamstring curls. And when you do hamstring curls, do them seated. Just a bunch of different things you can do to save time or make sure.

And incline chest is actually a good example too because we even have direct evidence that it's similar amounts of middle chest growth and more upper chest growth. So more bang for your buck for, for that exercise and so on. So yeah, keep the eight players in.

Yeah, we need more studies looking at exercise specific kinematics, that kind of stuff.

Like yeah, regional, regional muscle growth for sure.

All right, nutrition wise, what can we do to make sure that we're getting the best results from our minimum effective workouts?

Yeah, so obviously if the goal is growth, try to be in a surplus, but at least at maintenance. So we, we have a whole podcast episode on this. But at least 150 to 300 calorie surplus is probably a very good idea. But if you have trouble doing that, at least try to be at maintenance calories and make sure you get your protein in. I believe we have a full episode on this as well. But 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight is a good idea. If you're very overweight, then just use ideal body weight instead of using total body weight for that calculation. And beyond that it's just fill in the rest of the macros with a preference type deal. If you prefer to have carbs for the workout, do that totally fine. But for the most part hit your calorie goals, hit your protein goals and fill in the rest.

Macronutrient wise, if the ideal body weight thing doesn't work perfectly, which it does for most people. But if you don't like know what your ideal body weight is, whatever that might be, grams per centimeter of height seems to be a pretty good rule of thumb like a good like heuristic to use for that as well. So I'm a hundred and I don't know, whatever 6ft is, whatever 5, 11 and 3 quarters. I think it's like 160 something centimeters. That's pretty close to what I should be eating with respect to grams of protein per Day.

Yeah, I found out six months ago it was super cool. I tried it out at, like, six different examples of, like, clients, and it actually held, like, really well.

So it's, like, shocking how well it works once you start getting to crazy extremes, like, really, really tall. Because, like, a lot of really, really tall individuals also happen to be pretty skinny individuals. So it doesn't work for, like, my friend who's six six, essentially. But outside of, like, pretty extreme cases, it's kind of like a shockingly accurate heuristic to use for protein intake. Yeah. So sleep also super important, especially when we're trying to get away with the least that we can possibly do. So make sure that you're getting in at least seven hours, seven to nine hours a night, probably a little bit more, is probably never going to hurt you, at least from my understanding of the literature. In fact, getting more than nine hours seems to be beneficial for things like athletic outcomes, but not necessarily muscle growth. We don't have a lot of data on that, but it certainly seems to be good for optimizing not losing muscle while you're at least in the diet phase.

So, you know you're a hypertrophy researcher when you say athletic outcomes instead of athletic performance.

Who gives a fuck? Bleep that out. Sorry. It's the Built with Science podcast.

Exactly.

So building here and then. Yeah. Is there anything you want to say about sleep other than probably get it around 7 to 9 hours more is not going to hurt you?

No, I mean, I think it's super important for maximizing what you do in the gym. So it's definitely. Yeah. Up there. But other than that, I think sweet, cool supplements. Yeah. So there's one tried and true supplement that I think everyone hopefully has been forced into, at least trying one time and making sure that if, if, if all goes well with. With most individuals, all does go well, they just keep taking in perpetuity. But that's creatine, so it's effective. It works. Adds a little bit of weight to your frame. Feels good. Taking white powder every day, it's just, I don't know, something psychological about it.

Something about just having my fix creatine at all times. Like, I don't know what it is, but it's just. It's nice.

You started itching right at that on purpose.

Of course, bro. Yeah. Yeah. Creatine is amazing. It's actually. So that meta analysis that came out, shout out Ryan Burke, that showed it had like an effect size of 0.11. Right. Which sounds really low, especially when you use the normal hedges G interpretations of. Of effect sizes. But that's much larger in the context of muscle growth than people often give it credit for. So Greg Nichols has an incredible analysis of this. Basically found that within the first couple of months of taking creatine, as opposed to taking a placebo, you're building muscle approximately one third faster than you would if you were not taking it. Right. So not huge, not a steroid, nothing like crazy. But it's certainly beneficial and there's really not a good reason not to take it. It seems really safe and effective for the majority of individuals. Right? So yeah, creatine is great. If you want to take some other ones, that's probably fine, but it's the only one that we're going to sit here and recommend. We have two whole podcast episodes on probably up there.

In terms of just feeling better, at least during the session, being motivated to do more. We don't have direct. See, there we go.

So yeah, I can't recommend caffeine enough. Right before bed is your best time to take it, in my personal opinion. No, I'm just kidding. A lot of inter individual responses to caffeine. So that's another. That is really important thing to point out. Like caffeine will help you with performance at the gym, almost guaranteed. Not a lot of data, actually no data on caffeine's effect on muscle growth, but probably beneficial because of its impact on athletic outcomes, performance outcomes. But it is really important that if caffeine consumption interferes with sleep, then that's something that you're going to have to figure out the balance of to make that work for you. So yeah, caffeine and creatine both great. Make sure that if you're someone who caffeine affects your sleep, just try and have your workouts earlier in the day or at least cut off caffeine consumption by whatever time in the day that works for you. For most people, that's like 2pm and then of course, just keep your stress low outside of in. In your life. Stress as low as you possibly can to ensure that you're not having a bunch of interference from just stress. Stress is stress and you want to keep it as low as possible because having a super stressed out life, it's not good for gains all. Nor is it just good for life in general. You have anything else you want to say about this before we wrap up?

I think that's good. Yeah, the whole stress bucket idea. And if anything, actually all of these fall into that category. So making sure you get adequate sleep, making sure you get adequate calories and so on. So like a deficit, for example, is a stressor. Not getting enough sleep is a stressor. So making sure that you mitigate stressors so you can tolerate the stress of exercise is probably a good idea. So, yeah, I think that's pretty good.

Cool. So I'm not even going to give a rundown of the time thing because we have an entire episode on that that you guys should all take a listen to. But from an effort standpoint, the least you can get away with and still make gains. As long as you're somewhere between six and nine sets a week per each major, for each muscle, major muscle group, you can be relatively confident that you're going to be making substantial gains. At least not necessarily all of your gains, but substantial, meaningful, practical gains. With respect to how close to failure you should be training, anywhere from as low as eight repetitions away from failure can still cause growth. But if you're already training with pretty low volumes, you probably want to be somewhere between 0 and 3 repetitions in reserve. With respect to frequencies, you can get away with as low as one session a week. But you probably, just to hedge your bets, want to be somewhere between two and three. Just to make sure that you're actually able to stuff in as much volume as possible. Right? Make sure that when you're doing minimum effective dose training, you're using exercises that really give you the most bang for your buck in general. So you want to be doing things that train at most of your muscles at longer muscle lengths, and you want to be doing things that kind of hit multiple muscles per exercise. So a lot of your hamstring work, you probably want to be doing some sort of hip extension. But don't neglect knee flexion, because you need that for the short head of the biceps femoris. Of course, everyone knows that. Maybe do more, more incline work for the chest, stuff like that, right? And then of course, things outside of the gym. Make sure that you're getting enough calories to sustain life and hopefully grow a little bit. So slight surplus, 150 to 300 calories a day. Make sure you're getting your seven to nine hours. Take creatine because it's dope, it's good for almost everyone and just keep stress and life low. And you can do that by listening to the Built Science podcast with your favorite hosts, Coleman et al and Danny Boy. Thank you all so much for listening. If you have another topic that you want us to cover, please feel free to reach out to us at Built with Science on Instagram. As always, thank you so much for listening piece.